Psychometric Testing - Usage in recruitment - Another thread

[Ashles]

Apologies for posting this in the Business Scepticism forum as well as the Science forum, but I'm not sure which forum woulf be most appropriate and I'm really keen to get responses from anyone on this. (If it must only be one thread, mods please feel free to merge where appropriate)


My company's HR department is currently expressing an interest in using Psychometric Testing as part of its recruitment processes.

I am quite opposed to this as I do not see how it can be consistently and prefessionally applied in recruitment procedure by non-professionals. (How effective it is when properly applied by prefessionals in controlled environments is another issue which I'm not looking at here).

HR will not be controlling for environment, time of day, mood, comparability of other applicants, type of test usage etc.
And how accurately will HR members be able to analyse and interpret the given results?

The way I see it either too much weight is given to these tests (which everyone seems to agree is undesirable) or to little in which case all the usual recruitment techniques are utilised to the extent there seems to be no point in having the Psychometric testing at all.

Any thoughts either way?

 

[bpesta22]

Apologies for posting this in the Business Scepticism forum as well as the Science forum, but I'm not sure which forum woulf be most appropriate and I'm really keen to get responses from anyone on this. (If it must only be one thread, mods please feel free to merge where appropriate)


My company's HR department is currently expressing an interest in using Psychometric Testing as part of its recruitment processes.

I am quite opposed to this as I do not see how it can be consistently and prefessionally applied in recruitment procedure by non-professionals. (How effective it is when properly applied by prefessionals in controlled environments is another issue which I'm not looking at here).

HR will not be controlling for environment, time of day, mood, comparability of other applicants, type of test usage etc.
And how accurately will HR members be able to analyse and interpret the given results?

The way I see it either too much weight is given to these tests (which everyone seems to agree is undesirable) or to little in which case all the usual recruitment techniques are utilised to the extent there seems to be no point in having the Psychometric testing at all.

Any thoughts either way?

I could give you some opinions-- I am an assistant prof of human resource management.

What kind of positions are you hiring for; what kind of tests-- personality, cognitive ability, other-- are you thinking of giving, and how diverse is your workforce currently?

 

[sleepy_lioness]

There's a good book on this by a psychologist called Annie Murphy Paul: 'The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies and Misunderstand Ourselves' - I found it very interesting and entertaining. Basically it concludes that psychometric testing is a load of something-I-can't-say-on-this-forum.

On edit: actually, of course, it's about personality testing rather than psychometric testing. But I think there's quite a wide overlap.

 

[Ashles]

I could give you some opinions-- I am an assistant prof of human resource management.

What kind of positions are you hiring for; what kind of tests-- personality, cognitive ability, other-- are you thinking of giving, and how diverse is your workforce currently?

HR are looking to introcuce these for, as far as I know, all levels.

The company I work for is very big indeed with over 50,000 employees worldwide. It is not yet clear how much of this HR is looking at using the Psychometric testing in recruiting for.

The workforce is extremely diverse and the type of jobs vary massively, but again I don't know how many jobs HR are looking to roll this out for.

I am only involved in the European part of this company.

I assume the tests will be personality tests to ascertain suitibility for team and role, but at this point HR haven't told us anything really.

 

[bpesta22]

Well, there's a massive literature on how well various tests do re predicting job performance, and how much utility they provide in a selection decision.

http://content.apa.org/journals/bul/124/2/262.pdf

If you want this article, but can't access it, let me know and I can email it to you.

The major concern when selecting a test-- beyond whether it's valid-- is the issue of adverse impact (does it exclude minorities at higher rates than whites). Not sure about europe and how it handles AI, but in the USA, it's not necessarily illegal, but it is indeed something to worry about.

Fwiw, I personally think testing is the biggest contribution psych has made to humanity. When valuing my opinion on this stuff, perhaps this comment might help give a sense of where I am coming from.

 

[rjh01]

Well, there's a massive literature on how well various tests do re predicting job performance, and how much utility they provide in a selection decision.

http://content.apa.org/journals/bul/124/2/262.pdf

If you want this article, but can't access it, let me know and I can email it to you.
<snip>

The site wants you to pay for the article. So most people do not have access to this document. I suggest you do not admit you can or will e-mail this article.

 

[bpesta22]

The site wants you to pay for the article. So most people do not have access to this document. I suggest you do not admit you can or will e-mail this article.

Ok, but I emailed it to Ashles with two other articles yesterday. What should I admit?